Why are we using Reporting Tools for OLAP for BI apps?

[Jack Numen]

Here i would like to know why are we using reporting tools when we are having OLAP engine in Oracle 11g release-2 and many of the databases other than legacy ones have their support for OLAP.

For a reporting tools like BIRT or JASPER we are compromising performance since the flow is like this Java Code---->Birt/Jasper Engine------>Database.

Here i know that Reporting tools are used for graphical representation of data but here are we not compromising performance since our request is to be processed by three engine i.e. JVM(compulsary),Reporting Engine and the database.

I would like to know if Oracle 11g in its Release 2 is providing its own engine for OLAP is there a way apart from what i have mentioned above.Like i would like to have Java ----> Oracle(OLAP engine) to generate my reports. This is give me high performance as ORACLE is taking a lot of steps on performance in this release.

[Martin Vashko]

I've moved your question to the Oracle forum, where it will probably get more attention from Oracle minded folks.

I don't have experience with OLAP functionality in Oracle myself, but I can at least direct you to the documentation: search for "OLAP" on this page, there are several different books on this topic.

Anyway, using the reporting tools you've mentioned has the advantage of not being tied to one concrete database. Obviously such tools usually cannot use all the functionality of all the databases on the marked, so you'd be actually trading portability/versatility and ease of development (learn to use one reporting tool and you're able to do reports on several databases) for performance.

[Jack Numen]

Thanks Martin,
Without using a reporting tool we cannot easily develop a report on the other hand when we are dealing with OLAP we are dealing with large databases and for this when we are using a reporting tools lets suppose it takes minimal time to generate a report. Now my concern is in the worst case scenario the report generation time would always be very high since there is large database.

So i am thinking of finding a solution in order to eliminate the reporting tool block from the design and directly contact the database with my Java code.The conditions which apply include:

1.This solution can apply for OLAP other than OLAP reporting tools can be the ultimate solution for faster and efficient development.
2. Solution can apply for databases with inbuilt OLAP engines for all the other databases we have to use Reporting tools.